Captain Plinkerton
by alphonsogonzalez
Summary: Captain Alan Mutly, a Koran War hero, must once again put on his uniform to fight in Vietnam, surviving constant danger from his enemies and his immoral, war-torn friends. In the middle of the conflict, it is necessary for him to analyze his past in order to decide if his country is, indeed, a cause worth suffering for, worth killing for and worth dying for.


Captain Alan Mutly was dark skinned and tall, in the height of his age and a prestigious, decorated officer who served in the Korean War from beginning to end, showing himself to be amongst the most helpful, courageous and respected officers in the whole infantry, so that when it came the time to put on his uniform once more and fight in Vietnam, he was naturally assigned to office work. It angered him, surely, but at that time he was even angrier that he couldn't complain, or rather he could, but the complaint filing service was so bureaucratic that by the time he actually found out all the correct steps to register his complaint, he preferred to file a complaint on the quality of the complaint filing service, which was made even worse by the fact that the complaint registration was limited to one complaint per officer and he couldn't complain about that due to his previous complaint, which meant he had just wasted his time and accomplished absolutely nothing.

Mutly could remember his glorious days of horror in Korea. His freshman's love for the country and its people made it curious that he would adore its culture without ever learning a single thing about it. When he was a neophyte, he had carried out the boldest deeds of cowardice that made him a legend among his peers. He had not been bred, born educated and he surely had not signed up for any of that. His father had been a courageous Scottish man, an amateur in the French sense. A courageous young man coming from a peaceful and quite well-established childhood. He was married in Scotland, to an Englishwoman who was beautiful in the British sense. Soon after their marriage, they encountered heavy financial difficulties that forced them to immigrate to the land of opportunity in search of a better standard of living, realizing very soon that it was the dumbest possible decision, as the family went even poorer, but once again the family spirit prevailed and the couple banded together to survive through it, but they may have banded a little too tightly, to the point where it couldn't be pulled out in time, resulting in a healthy and prestigious offspring, which greatly angered Mutly's father because he wasn't allowed to relieve himself from hard days of work and emotional abuse from his patrons for nine months, but the family once more banded together and got through it. In a few days, the poor man lost his job, but the family banded together once again to get through it. When they were thrown out of the house, Mutly's father took a wise decision, realizing the mistake he had committed and, willing to go back and redeem himself, dumped the bitch and went back to Scotland.

Mutly's distaste for the office had carried him on a long, extremely well-articulated rant that provided his co-workers with an hour of entertainment, at the end of which, he fell asleep and dreamt of his terrible days in Korea, where it was always cold, everyone looked the same and the food sucked. He missed every second of it. Then he began to remember when his fellow officers, one by one, going out for missions and never returning. He missed every second of that too. After that he began to remember how much Korea made him miss every second of his life in American and started missing every second of that too.

As the clock stroke three in the morning, Mutly realized that he had committed the most unspeakable crime of falling asleep while at work. The Op-Center in Saigon never sleeps, meaning that no one in there ever sleeps, either, and if they did than they'd have to deal with the fury of Colonel Fleming. The cold, dead silence of night and the darkness both inside and outside the station, coupled with the fact that all of the population was asleep by now, meant that Mutly had no excuse for being asleep. He had been working the whole day through, which made it even more inexcusable.


End file.
